


forever ever

by magisterequitum



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Character Death, Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-03
Updated: 2013-05-03
Packaged: 2017-12-10 08:03:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/783725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magisterequitum/pseuds/magisterequitum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her fingers are wet and tacky, shoved just under the space below Katherine's ribcage. She lets her nails trail over the flesh and muscle. </p><p>Turn about is fair play.</p>
            </blockquote>





	forever ever

**Author's Note:**

> I've been fascinated by the doppleganger mythos since S2, and it always coming to end at some point through this way. Spoilers for the finale say something like this could happen.

Her fingers are wet and tacky, shoved just under the space below Katherine's ribcage. She lets her nails trail over the flesh and muscle. 

It's intoxicating as she stares into eyes identical to hers. Only the ones she's looking at have blown glassy pupils and are wide where she's narrowed in triumph. 

Turn about is fair play, Elena thinks and squeezes. 

 

 

 

Elena's head is a mess. Her entire being is an exposed nerve of unending feelings, every emotion she'd damned up and denied assaulting her all at once. Over and over again. She sits on the couch in the boarding house. Stares forward as she picks away at each emotion. Grief she keeps. Shame she keeps. Guilt she keeps. Things like love and sadness are put away. Anger rises at the top. 

When she blinks, she realizes that Damon and Stefan are still talking. About her. And what she must do now. 

They don't get it. She won't explain again. 

She rises to her feet, the blanket falling to the floor. It's easy to walk again. She already did it in the woods. 

"Don't follow me," she says to empty air because she doesn't look back. 

 

 

 

Alaric's loft is musty and stale smelling. No one's been there since he died, she can tell. Dust and forgotten things scattered about. The history book he'd been planning their latest weekly lesson from. The coffee cup on the counter not rinsed out. His bathrobe on the doorknob. 

Tears prick at her eyes. 

Sadness but she's put that away for right now. 

She opens a window to clear the air and then sits at the tiny table. Slides a legal pad and a pen over towards her. 

Her phone buzzes, and she doesn't even need to look at the screen to know who it is. She doesn't want to talk to them. The ones she does she has no right to at the moment. Apologies will be empty and hollow until she can show, and maybe time is good for now. She leaves a voicemail for Caroline and her fingers shake over the buttons to leave one for Bonnie. Matt, she simply tells him sorry and hangs up. The others she deletes. 

The pen fits too well in Elena's hand. 

She thinks and then she writes. 

 

 

 

Black ink spreads across the page in neat script. Line after line, step after step. 

She's always been her most deadly with no distractions

She's always been her most deadly when she wants someone to die. She's just only now realized that power. 

 

 

 

The vervain is still under the sink. 

The crossbow isn't the same as the one she learned on, a bit heavier, meant for Ric or Jeremy to use, but she's not frail human strength anymore. She could lift it regardless. She won't need to lift it though. 

Two weapons already. She thinks of the conversation in the basement. Then she thinks of the conversation in the diner. The third will be her tongue. 

 

 

 

Elena closes the window in the morning. Draws the curtains over. The warmth of the sun touches her still as she's not fast enough, and her bones ache beneath her whole and clean skin. Her ring sits tight on her finger. She touches it with her pinky, feels the cold metal, and the sudden smell of smoke invades her nostrils. It's a calculated recall from her memory, just like how the scent of her mother's perfume and her father's favorite tea leaves create the same reaction. 

She doesn't bother to wipe the tear away this time. 

 

 

 

"Bonnie's using Katherine to get the gravestone." 

Caroline sits across from Elena in Ric's loft. Her lips are tight, her fingers stray across her jean clad legs, and her eyes don't quite meet Elena's. 

"Okay," Elena says. "Okay. It can wait." 

"She's getting it later today. Because of the moon." 

They do not talk about Bonnie. 

Elena nods again. She feels empty and full all at the same time, as if it's months ago and they're talking about something else, only she can still hear the way Caroline's collarbone had broken as she fell to the floor, and Elena caused that. 

There will be time for this later. She'd laugh because that's how it always is lately, but she can't bring herself to do that. She's got little to laugh at. None of them do. 

"Are you," Caroline bites her lip and sucks the bottom one between her teeth. "Okay?" 

The same question that Damon and Stefan had asked her in the woods over Matt's dead body and their terrible hands reaching for her. Caroline is warmth though, shining sincerity and hope in her blue eyes. Caroline is here when she shouldn't be. Caroline is Caroline, the girl who let Elena wear her brand new sweater when she'd spilled juice on it in middle school, the girl who made her a study plan when she was failing geometry, the girl who tried to piece her back together. 

"No," Elena's throat closes over. "I'm not." 

The crossbow sits in the kitchen, the vervain near it and ready. 

Vanilla and jasmine invade her nostrils and replace the phantom stench of smoke, and Caroline's arms are warm and soft around her. "But I will be," she says in shiny gold curls. 

 

 

 

Once when Elena had first learned about Katherine she'd stood in her bathroom and stared at her face in the mirror. She'd plugged in her curling iron and created perfect blown out spirals. She'd slicked her lips with the darkest lipstick Jenna had once bought her. She'd darkened her eyes and lengthened her lashes. And then she'd taken a blade from her razor and made the tiniest cut, a scar between her thumb and index finger. Red then but now pink, a distinction of her. 

Now, Elena stands in the bathroom of Ric's loft and straightens every strand of her hair. She cleans her face. Chapstick on her lips and only a smudge of brown on her eyes. She dresses in a blue sleeved henley and laces up sneakers. She'd bought them down the street earlier with Caroline at her back. 

She smiles in the mirror, white teeth and she looks just like how she'd always been. 

Her. 

 

 

 

Bonnie takes the gravestone out in the woods. 

Elena waits, listening, and when Bonnie walks past her with the rock beneath her arm, their eyes meet. Bonnie's chin lifts and her eyes flit over her shoulder. A warning, a nod. 

"Elena," Katherine croons when she steps out from behind the trees. "Did the boys actually let you out for good?" 

"I don't answer to them," she says, walking forward and then stopping. She tilts her head and raises a brow. "Though I have to hand it to you for not locking me in. Made it much easier." 

Katherine's smirk curls across her face, a naked blade sharp and ready. "It was getting a little dull, your whole act." 

"Sorry to disappoint." She circles to the right, Katherine to the left, a mirroring dance under a clear sky. There's no one else around. No one else in the woods. "I guess you're hard up for anything entertaining lately, aren't you?" 

Teeth peek out behind lush red lips. A sniff from an exhale, "Things are about to get pretty interesting actually." 

Elena laughs, her voice high and sharp, bursting out of her, because it's the perfect line of dialogue, so cliche and neat. She couldn't have scripted it better. 

Katherine's brows draw close in confusion, and she takes a step closer, her eyes darting to the tree line. 

The bolt slips down Elena's sleeve, the tiny sting of it and the burn of her flesh from where she's kept it there since she walked from her car. It's too late, and she surges forward as Katherine's mouth opens for another round. They've circled too close. Mimicking movements that have put them only two feet away. The jugular isn't hard to hit. Throbbing slowly and openly, her eyes find it too easy, and Katherine's hand crushes her wrist, grinding the bones together, but Elena gets it in. 

Katherine steps back and topples over, the bolt sticking from her neck, the vervain slipping into her blood stream. 

 

 

 

Her fingers are wet and tacky, shoved just under the space below Katherine's ribcage. She lets her nails trail over the flesh and muscle. 

"You killed Jeremy," Elena tells Katherine, so close their lips nearly touch. She wants to make sure the last thing Katherine sees is her own eyes. "Bonnie was never going to let you have all that. You're not even important enough for her to be here. But I am." 

To her credit, Katherine says nothing. It could be the vervain eating through her vocal chords, the bolt still jammed in her neck, or it could be Elena's grip around her heart. She thinks, as she looks into those wide eyes and red lips struggling to lift into a snarl, that that's not it at all. 

She thinks too on saying everything else that Katherine has done. A list of damnations before the final act. It would be fitting. 

But it's not true. That's not what she's here for. 

"You killed Jeremy," she says and squeezes hard. She's watched others do it. She knows where to reach and pull and twist. So easy in the end. "This is for me." 

The heart beats once more in her hand after she jerks it from Katherine's body. She holds it and stares down into eyes that are dim now, eyes that are hers. With bloody fingers she closes the lids. 

 

 

 

In the mirror it is only her. She cannot see herself. 

She touches the little scar in the webbing on her hand. There's wetness on her face. 

It is only her.


End file.
